The Carroll Gardens bakery, which has been in operation for more than a century, suddenly closed earlier this week.
Photo: Google Maps
If you want to hurt a neighborhood, close one of its favorite restaurants. If you want to hobble a neighborhood, eliminate one of the pillar businesses that supply those restaurants. Caputo’s Bake Shop, which has provided thousands of Brooklynites and dozens of Brooklyn restaurants and shops with their daily bread, abruptly closed this week after 122 years and five generations of family ownership.
“It’s pretty awful,” says Eric Finkelstein of Court Street Grocers. “Most of our most popular sandwiches were on that bread.” That included the Vegitalian, which the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner recently declared “maybe my favorite sandwich, period.” (“There’s nothing like a worn-in Italian bakery, and Caputo was, for me, the epitome,” Rosner tells me.)
Across its three locations, Court Street Grocers ordered roughly 6,000 Caputo’s loaves of various kinds each week, but that wasn’t always the case: When the shop opened, it bought no bread from Caputo’s. After Hurricane Sandy, when none of the bakeries they were using could deliver, they turned to Caputo’s. It started with one sandwich, and the number only grew over the years.
“There was something about it,” Finkelstein says. “They were able to get a really thin crust. It wasn’t airy, but light, the crumb. We’ve tried all the bread over the years, and we never found anything we liked as much anywhere in the city.”
Finkelstein got a text from Caputo on Monday; that day’s delivery would be the last.
“We’ve been scrambling,” since then, he says. A bread distributor on Long Island was able to get them bread from a small bakery in Yonkers that was “not near as good. It looks the same.”
“I’ve been doing this for the past 25 years,” says James Caputo, the 55-year-old fifth-generation steward of the bakery. “I was married to the business. If I didn’t do it this way, make a decision this way, I would have been there until I died — it was time.” He adds, “If I did a slow gradual phaseout, I know I’d find a way to keep going.”
The bakery had strong connections, both past and present, with many businesses in the area. Joe Brancaccio, owner of Brancaccio’s Food Shop in Windsor Terrace, had been using Caputo bread for his sandwiches for 16 years. “I live in Cobble Hill,” he says. “I like doing business with friends. I use them because it’s honest to what I do in my shop. That’s the best way I can think of to put it.”
Marco Polo, one of the last red-sauce joints in the once heavily Italian Carroll Gardens, bought bread from Caputo’s for 20 years.
When the bar Fort Defiance operated in Red Hook, it used a Caputo’s seeded round loaf for its muffaletta sandwich, and Alex Raij and Eder Montero’s Cobble Hill café Tekoá served Caputo’s bread while it was open.
“My twin daughters got both of their birthday cakes from Caputo’s for the last 13 years,” says Mike Vacheresse of Travel Bar on Court Street. “We used to buy all of our cheese from Stinky on Smith Street and all our bread from Caputo’s.”
“We used their bread at Brooklyn Social for 22 years,” says Matt Dawon, an owner of that long-standing bar on Smith Street. “We wanted to honor the neighborhood and the Italian American history and use local purveyors.”
Georgia Fulton, the new owner of Sam’s pizzeria on Court Street, who plans to reopen this summer, had intended to continue Sam’s long-standing relationship with Caputo’s. Now she’s not sure where she’ll get her bread — possibly Mazzola Bakery, which is on the corner of Henry and Union Streets and is the last old Italian bakery in a neighborhood that used to support several. Marco Polo will be buying from Mazzola from now on. Brancaccio was already using Mazzola for some of his sandwiches.
Caputo’s was founded on Court Street in 1904, across the street from its current location, a two-story building that was built from the ground up by James’s grandfather about 60 years ago. James and his parents lived on the second floor. Over time, as the bakery needed more space, the second floor was converted to handle prep work.
Many of the recipes go back to James’s great-great-grandfather. Varieties of bread were fewer in early years, but new items like French baguettes were added over time. Caputo’s was particularly known for its olive bread and the long, thin loaves known as “Sinatras,” which may be a coinage of the bakery’s.
Baking began at Caputo every evening at 7 p.m. and didn’t stop until 1 p.m. the next day. As a result, James says he was never able to “disconnect” from the business, and that the phone would ring a couple times every night without fail. In the end, he decided against selling the business. “It entered my mind,” he says, “but it’s always been my family who ran the business. It wouldn’t be the same. It was my family who started this, and it was going to be my family who ended it.”
Caputo’s received some press and praise over the years, but more than that, it was a steady, reliable business, the owners keeping their heads down and focusing on the work. I suggested to Finkelstein that perhaps locals in brownstone Brooklyn were spoiled by Caputo’s and didn’t know how good they had it until the bakery closed. He disagrees. “Today is proving that everyone did know it,” Finkelstein says.
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